Tag Archives: stone

Late again, but just with the post. I got this picture over the weekend which was within my self imposed weekly deadline. Usually missing my deadline (or any deadline) would drive me absolutely nuts, but I decided that I wouldn’t beat myself up about it this time. Lately I’m trying to be more relaxed and not stress myself out over little things. Although my stress free mentality was partially why I missed my posting deadline, the main reason for the latent post was because last week was one hell of a week. It was my turn again to provide support coverage for work, and let’s just say the luck of the Irish was not on my side. Every time I tried to venture out to get a picture my phone buzzed. The constant interruption, or threat of one, didn’t allow me to get more than a few blocks from my apartment. Although my localized limitation still would have permitted me to visit the Hoboken waterfront, I didn’t want to feature another skyline picture this week. There are a lot of techniques that I’m still exploring and to do so I need to find something beyond the skyline to experiment on.

After walking around for about an hour I got a couple good pictures which I thought would potentially work as a featured photo but nothing made me too excited. On my way back to my apartment I stumbled upon a church with this beautiful stone front exterior. The masonry was looking exceptionally nice because of the way it was catching the fading light of twilight. I reached back into my bag pulled out my camera and began the result is what you see here.

Photography concepts:

Last week I threw out a challenge to try and shoot more pictures in “manual” mode. Unfortunately this week’s photograph was not shot in manual, but it was a step in the right direction. After spotting how the light was getting captured along the church’s jagged stone edges, I knew that I couldn’t let my camera make the exposure decision. As good as my camera is, the human eye is better at judging exposure.

When I pulled out my camera it was in aperture priority with spot metering turned on, so I stuck with that setting. In case you didn’t know, spot metering mode allows you to set (or “meter”) the exposure of your image from a specific point. Usually if you leave your camera on the default mode, which for my Nikon is “matrix metering” (the name varies by camera brand), the camera will inspect what’s in frame and choose what it thinks is the best overall exposure. The important part of that statement is the word “overall.” What I’ve noticed is that when a picture has lots of variance in shading sometimes the camera will try to compensate for the darker areas such as shadows and overexpose the image. The image won’t be overexposed to the level that there is damage done, but it doesn’t look like what you see with the naked eye. One way to prevent your camera’s miscalculation is to shoot in manual, which as I said I did not do this time. The other is to use a more manual metering method, which is what I did with spot metering. For this picture I metered my exposure off of the top of the image. The top had the most amount of light so I wanted to make sure that stayed exposed just right, with the rest of the image fading into shadow. The difference in lighting a little more obvious in a zoomed out version of my picture.

Picture Info: ISO 640, 17mm, f/22, 1/400sec

As you can see spot metering allows you to get a very natural look with the shadows. This is a mode that I’ve been experimenting a lot with lately, the hardest part is having the time to select the exposure point and recompose. In the coming weeks I’ll continue to work spot metering into my photography and try to point it out whenever I do.

This week as we rolled into 2014 and January, so rolled in the extremely cold weather. On New Year’s day we were hit with a blizzard dubbed “Hercules,” which dumped a good amount of snow all over the east coast. The news of the blizzard got me really excited to get out and shoot my first set of snow pictures with my Nikon. Going into the weekend the plan was to explore Greenwood Cemetery with one of my friends that was out with me last week. After receiving written permission to walk around the Cemetery, everything was a go, that is until the snow. After the large snowstorm we were unsure how it would affect our plans, good or bad. The night before our shoot we could do nothing more than hope we wouldn’t run into any issues and plan on ways to survive the cold.

The next day when we finally arrived at Greenwood we were greeted with a sign that said “gates closed due to inclement weather.” Although we saw the sign we decided to try our luck by driving through the open gate. Upon driving through the gate we were immediately stopped by a security guard that informed us the cemetery was closed until after 12PM. Since we were working under some time restraints that wasn’t good news, so unfortunately we’d have to call an audible.

Luckily as it turns out prospect park was only about 5 minutes away from Greenwood, so we decided to give the park a go. Even though we were two days removed from the storm, the streets were still covered with mounds of snow and it seemed nearly impossible to find parking. When we were just about to give up, BINGO, we got a spot! And so our snow picture quest began.

We entered the park at the South/West entrance which is guarded by two towering statues of men on horses. Surrounding the gates were some interesting pine trees which were draped with loosely packed snow. As we tried to take pictures under the trees we had to dodge random mini avalanches of snow falling from the trees. Even though the trees offered plenty of good picture opportunities we decided to work our way into the park and double back later.

Pines at the gates

For about the next hour we worked our way East along the Southern perimeter of the park. One of the most interesting parts of the trek was combing along the shore line of Prospect Park Lake. The Lake was iced over and presented some temptation to venture out. The temptation was cured after seeing “rescue ladders” which meant many have tried and failed. I decided to steer clear yet at one point still almost managed to fall in. As we reached the South/East corner of the park we spotted a gazebo built from logs that was nestled along the shore of the lake. We stopped there for a while before working our way back to the main gates to end our trip. Just as we were exiting the park I spotted this lion’s head that was built into the gates. I shouted to my friend and said I had to get a picture of this. As you may have guessed this is where I got this week’s picture and to date it might be my favorite picture from this blog.

Gazebo on the lake

Photography concepts:

Throughout this week I’ve been experimenting with black and white pictures and the different editing techniques for them. After watching some YouTube tutorials and doing my best to duplicate the editing in Lightroom, I’ve quickly realized how much fun black and white photography can be. After taking this week’s picture, although it looked perfectly good in color, I decided to flip it to black and white and see what happened.

I’m still very new to editing in black and white, but what I can already see as being the key are the different color sliders. The color sliders allow you to focus in on colors such as Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple, and Magenta, and make adjustments. Now you’re probably saying “wait isn’t this a black and white picture? Why would you adjust colors?” Well, although it’s black and white the original picture’s colors are still part of the attributes and editable. As you adjust the sliders you’re adjusting the levels of their representation in black and white. In the case of this week’s picture I was able to blow out all the colors to make the lions face appear to be white/silver, or flip it to black. In the end I decided to settle right in the middle and set the lion’s face to a grayish slate. Focusing in on the colors is great because it allowed me to change the tint without losing the attributes of other colors such as the white. I really like the contrast these sliders allowed me to create and I can’t wait to experiment with this more in the coming weeks.

If you’re new to this blog circle back and read some of my older posts. In my earlier posts I’ve touched on subjects such as the rule of thirds, the triangle of photography and the different effects each point of the triangle (ISO/Aperture/Shutter speed) have on a photo. As I’ve been progressing in my photography journey these are becoming more second nature and I’m beginning to focus more on editing techniques and changing the content that I shoot (people, close-ups, non-landscape). I’m laying out some projects for 2014 so stay tuned and see what happens.